Fake News: “I have the support of my Cabinet”

This phrase is fake news at any level – let’s take it at national and local level as an example

1. As with the national government where May chose her Cabinet, so does the Leader of EDDC. They choose people closest to them and the ones most inclined to do their bidding – it would be foolish to do anything else.

2. Cabinets are not chosen for quality – they are chosen for obedience. It’s no use May saying she tolerates Boris for not being a “yes man” as it is precisely that which has endangered her. A foolish “strategy” to follow if, like her or any other Leader, you want to cling to power. See Trump and Kim Jong-Un. You upset Trump, he fires you; you upset Kim … let’s not go there.

3. It pays to choose weak and feeble Cabinet members if you are their Leader. It strengthens your position. The downside is that you then have to forge VERY close relationships with your civil servants and officers as they are the route to getting your agenda fulfilled (or, in the case of the current government, a very close relationship with the DUP forged with a £1 billion bribe).

4. As soon as anyone hits a Cabinet, they get a vastly increased taste for power – it’s like a drug. They spend days and nights thinking about how THEY could make a better job of things. There is no such thing as loyalty to a Leader in a Cabinet.

So, when any leader says they have the full support of their cabinet – FAKE NEWS!

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One thought on “Fake News: “I have the support of my Cabinet””

That is the state of democratic politics in the UK as it has become not as it should be.

In a democracy, there should be room for a range of views, to be debated and to reach either consensus or a majority vote.

A strong leader would be able to handle such a range of views, to allow space for such debate and to forge a consensus by persuasion rather than bullying.

But what we have these days is a democracy where any form of dissent is disallowed. BoJo can’t say something different without being labelled a traitor and bullied out of the Cabinet, the Labour Party can’t have a different view without being called trotskyists or lunatics. Anyone who stands up to complain about the NHS being privatised is told they don’t know what they are talking about.

This is no longer a democracy – it is no longer possible to hold any politician to account, and without accountability you can’t have transparency, and politicians feel free to lie whenever they think it is expedient and they never feel they have to resign, and when they lie they deny debate because a debate will prove their lies and then democracy is dead.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have starved Labour of funds from Unions whilst still allowing funds from to themselves from large corporates, using the millions of pounds from their ultra-rich billionaire sponsors to fund extensive media and social media campaigns that labour hasn’t a hope of matching – how fair and democratic is that? Let’s also not forget that the 2015 election was tainted by proven electoral fraud even though every single Conservative politician who might have been held accountable managed to avoid prosecution, and that the referendum Leave campaigns’ funding is also under scrutiny at present for alleged irregularities (i.e. double the allowed funding plus under the table payments).

BoJo’s disloyalty and bullying by others is only a symptom of a far more deep rooted malaise – shooting at that is pointing your canon at quite the wrong target.